Tag: crime statistics

I’ll never forget my tactical training – particularly my live-fire course. For five minutes, I had to wend my way through a mockup of a detention facility, making split-second decisions on which pop-up targets to shoot (and firing with high accuracy). Is it an armed suspect? A civilian? An officer? That five minutes felt like an eternity. It was for a worst-case scenario that was extremely unlikely, but the training was important.

I had a rifle and a pistol and I was sweating bullets the whole time. That five minutes felt like it would never end. I cannot imagine being unarmed and trapped by a maniac with guns who is shooting at everything that moves. That must be a hellish experience, one I pray no other human being ever has to face. After the Ft. Hood shooting, a friend who was much younger than I asked how a psychologist could attack a room full of soldiers and be the only one holding a gun.

My response confused the hell out of her at first:

Bill Clinton.

One of the very first acts that Bill Clinton made after being elected to the Presidency was to declare military installations “gun-free zones”. He immediately issued an order making it illegal for soldiers to carry personal firearms on base. More than that, though, he also made it close to impossible for XO’s (executive officers) to issue firearms to their troops to carry on base for protection. Since March of 1993, our troops – highly trained individuals who spend weeks learning everything about their rifles and pistols – have been disarmed on their own bases. It is because of President Clinton, an outrageously liberal and breathtakingly arrogant man, that our troops were disarmed and vulnerable at Ft. Hood and, tragically, yesterday at NAVSEA.

I can certainly appreciate the desire to make people safer. For many who have never been victims and have never had anything resembling law enforcement or tactical training, it seems to be logical to want to make all guns illegal. The problem comes in when they refuse to let go of that belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence that proves banning guns only makes things worse.

One of the biggest factors that determines how many deaths there are during a mass shooting is the amount of time it takes for an armed good guy to show up. In almost all of the recent mass shootings, the longer it took for police to arrive and return fire, the more deaths and injuries resulted. The only exception is the Tucson shooting – Loughner’s extended clip (as many of them are wont to do) failed to load a round properly, causing a jam that he hadn’t trained to clear quickly. Folks who want to ban extended clips ignore this fact; the springs in those clips have to do more work and they’re no more sturdy than the springs in standard clips, causing loading issues after the first few rounds.

That’s beside the point, though. All anyone who wants to ban certain cosmetic features can see is that it “looks more dangerous”. Never mind the fact that the term “assault weapon” is nauseatingly redundant.

At NAVSEA yesterday, it took seven minutes for the first armed police officers to arrive and begin an actual response. Seven minutes of terror for those innocent people. Seven minutes where any of the military members in the building could have pulled a weapon and taken Alexis out before he could kill twelve people. For those that were hiding, it was actually closer to an hour or two before police were able to locate them and lead them out of the building. In all of that time, not one of the highly-trained sailors or Marines in that facility was able to do what they were trained to do: take the fight to the bad guy.

It is a sin and a shame that we train these men and women and then tell them we don’t trust them with the very tools we trained them on. It is unforgivable that they are almost safer in a war zone than they are on their own soil. The history of mass shootings the statistics that come out of them tell us that they always target gun-free zones and they are deadlier with every second that ticks by without a good guy with a gun responding.

Aaron Alexis should have been prosecuted on felony charges in 2004, when he first walked out of his grandmother’s home and deliberately fired several rounds at a car. We don’t even need to have a discussion about his obvious mental illness – his actions nine years ago should have been enough to make him a prohibited person. The whole point of current gun laws is to identify those who will be dangerous with guns, prosecute them, and shut down their ability to legally purchase a gun. The system failed twice. He was able to carry out this shooting for two reasons: because police and prosecutors failed to do their jobs and because innocent people were disarmed and unable to defend themselves.

Side note: it’s hilarious to me that with all of the problems going on in The District, lawmakers there are focusing on the evils of body art. They’re trying to pass a law requiring a 24-hour waiting period for getting tattoos or piercings.

Many of my friends have been posting a video clip of Alex Jones on Piers Morgan telling the British liberal elitist that “1776 will commence again” if the government tries to take our guns. They all think it’s great, but they forget who he is.

Jones is a 9/11 truther, a bona fide member of the tin-foil hat brigade who was interviewed along with several other truthers for a History Channel special on 9/11 conspiracy theories – toward the end of the special, he compared himself to Galileo, saying, “I’m saying the world is round, I’m saying that 9/11 is an inside job, I’m showing the official story is a fraud, a flat Earth theory, and I know I’m going to be vindicated.” Later, outside the Denver Mint (near the 2008 Democratic Convention was taking place), Jones went on a screaming rant during which he chased Michelle Malkin around the crowd, calling her “evil” and “a monster”. In an interview after that incident he claimed that he was set up, that his voice was normal, he was being polite and just asking a question – but that Malkin’s “people” created the video as disinformation.

In short, Alex Jones is a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal.

I can’t stand the guy. He’s an embarrassment to the conservative cause. Completely aside from fudging the fact that 1776 actually wasn’t the start of the American Revolution (it had been cooking for years prior to the outbreak of the actual war, with the Tea Party occurring in 1773 – yes, I really am that cheeky), Jones did exactly what Piers invited him on the show to do: have a complete meltdown.

Jones fudges a few points in his long-winded growling and howling session. He states that out of 11,000 supposed gun deaths in America in 2012 (a figure that can’t be backed up since statistics won’t be available until next year), 74% were gang-related – that is false, and he never says where he gets his ridiculous statistics. The most recent statistics available from the FBI show that in 2011, 12,664 homicides occurred. Of that number, right around 68% were committed with firearms – 8,583 exactly. About 53% of all homicides occurred during the commission of another crime (burglary, robbery, auto theft, rape, etc.). According to the statistics, only about 673 homicides in 2011 were inter-gang in nature – that’s about .5% of all homicides. Oops.

Rather than calmly countering Piers’ questions about gun murders in the US as opposed to the UK (something that’s easy to do if you simply compare violent crime rates as a whole), Jones just calls him “a Hatchet Man of the New World Order” and then tells him to set up a boxing ring. Jones is a one-man wrecking crew; Piers knew what he was doing when he invited him, and Jones played right into it. He beautifully made the Limey’s point that those of us who support the Second Amendment are all drooling mouth-breathers who don’t know how to have an intelligent conversation.

He is the pathetic caricature that President Obama paints all conservatives as. Sadly, the media is only to happy to give him airtime because of it.

Not quite two years ago, however, Ted Nugent went on Piers Morgan’s show and very articulately took him out to the woodshed on gun control. It’s so beautiful it almost brought a tear to my eye. You aren’t going to see Nuge or John Lott on Piers right now…he’s too busy building the aforementioned narrative.